Floyd: Every baby needs safe haven

Sometime during the night of Dec. 3, the just-born infant girl was wrapped in a towel and left at the backdoor entrance to a 24-hour walk-in emergency room. She was still less than an hour old when she was found by no-doubt-surprised employees.

It’s important to note that the person who left the baby did not, technically, satisfy the requirements of Texas’ “Baby Moses” law.

The statute says an infant less than 60 days old may be surrendered without fear of prosecution at any fire station, hospital, police station or emergency room. The baby, however, must be handed over to a responsible adult, which little Murphy obviously wasn’t.

But someone obviously worried enough, or knew the law well enough, to choose a safe place where the baby would be cared for. For that reason, Collin County investigators and prosecutors were wise not to seek charges against the baby’s unknown parents.

For reasons we can only guess, the mother did not want to keep her, did not want to be identified and, perhaps, had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret. But she still wanted the baby to be looked after.

Baby Murphy, so named because the clinic where she was found is in the Collin County town of Murphy, is just fine.

The baby was released from a Plano hospital last Tuesday weighing 5 pounds, 9 ounces to a foster family.

Texas’ Baby Moses law — and those like it, which have since been enacted in all 50 states — can be credited for similar outcomes. They address the subtle distinction between “surrendering” and “abandoning” a baby. That, in turn, can be the difference between life and death.

Yet getting the word out about these “safe haven” laws — especially to the vulnerable young and possibly desperate women who need to know about them most — has been a frustratingly slow process.

“When it was passed in 1999, there was no funding attached to the legislation,” said Patsy Summey, a retired Dallas grade school teacher who is project coordinator for a volunteer support group called Baby Moses Dallas.

As a result, it was up to communities themselves to publicize the law with fliers, educational programs and standardized signs to clearly mark Baby Moses “safe surrender” sites.

That might have been at the top of the agenda in 2001, when Texas’ legislation, the nation’s first, became law. But 10 days after the law went into effect, the 9/11 attacks took place, effectively wiping every other issue from the public consciousness.

That has led to a patchwork effort to identify and standardize procedures across the state and the country.

Because states individually passed the laws, there are significant variations in their “safe haven” guidelines as to the age the babies can be when they’re surrendered and what types of public establishments can be designated.

A circle of volunteers based in Oak Cliff formed Baby Moses Dallas in 2004, hoping to create the widespread publicity the law still needed.

According to their statistics, more than 100 infants are abandoned every year in Texas — and 15 percent of them are found dead, sometimes thrown away like trash.

Over the last 10 years, Baby Moses Dallas has created public service announcements and lobbied cities to accept free “safe haven” signs to be posted at city fire and police stations.

“It took almost 18 months of working through the different levels of the Dallas City Hall to get the free signs accepted,” Pasty said.

Even now, she said, some stations are not marked with the black-and-yellow bilingual signs.

In addition, the group is trying to spread its efforts into surrounding communities, urging eligible hospitals to post signs or offer literature about the Baby Moses law.

It’s a long, fragmented and sometimes frustrating process, and they could use some help. An enterprising Eagle Scout, for instance, visited all the eligible surrender sites in his community to check whether they had signs posted and whether they were even aware of their status.

You can help — anybody can — in several ways. You can visit the group’s site at babymosesdallas.org. Next time you visit a fire station, police station or hospital, you can look for the sign, and if you don’t see one, ask why not.

And you can make a tax-deductible donation to help Baby Moses Dallas in its tireless effort to get the word out.

Not all babies have a lucky start in life. But they’re all entitled to safe haven.

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